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Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White
Category->Ethnic Studies
Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White

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By Daniel J. Sharfstein. In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear. In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed. Penguin Group (2011), English, Hardcover: 416 pages.

 

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights. --Henry Louis Gates Jr.

 

About the author: Daniel J. Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he has been awarded fellowships in legal history from Harvard, New York University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written for The Yale Law Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, and other publications. He lives with his family in Nashville, Tennessee.

 

"[A]stonishingly detailed rendering of the complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights." -New York Times Book Review

 

"[A] . . . . The Invisible Line is not only a work of serious scholarship based on exhaustive archival research but an immensely satisfying read. The only dissatisfaction comes from acknowledging the pain, shame, and anger that forced some Americans to deny part of who they really were." -Boston Globe

 

"...Succeeds brilliantly in showing us that before politics began hardening colour lines in the run-up to the civil war, pragmatism often trumped prejudice...[W]hat makes this book a must-read are Sharfstein's revelations about antebellum America." -Financial Times

 

"This book overthrows nearly everything Americans thought they knew about race." -Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and There Is No Me Without You

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